Press Release

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Feb 26, 2013 – Intacct, a leader in cloud financial management and accounting software, today announced that IslandWood has replaced a combination of Blackbaud and QuickBooks with a single Intacct solution to more quickly gain key financial insights into the health of its organization. Moving to Intacct increased accounting efficiencies, saving the organization about 35 person-hours of work each month while reducing human error, increasing financial and operational visibility, and eliminating IT support needs.

Located on Bainbridge Island near Seattle, IslandWood is an outdoor learning center that serves around 12,000 school children each year throughout the Puget Sound region to inspire lifelong environmental and community stewardship. After ten years in operation, the organization is planning major expansion over the next five years and recognized an opportunity to replace its cumbersome packaged accounting software with a pure cloud-based financial management system for greater transparency. With a planned $5 million budget increase and four new strategic initiatives underway, IslandWood knew that it needed greater flexibility to manage a broader range of donors, as well as remote access to keep up with the pace of several new off-site programs.

“We chose Intacct over several other vendors because it delivers everything we need to efficiently run our organization in a reliable, easy to access cloud solution,” said Jennifer Sharp, senior accounting manager at IslandWood. “With Intacct, we saw a system that would streamline our financial processes and give a wide variety of people in our organization real-time visibility into key financial metrics from anywhere. We also love the seamless, feature-rich upgrades that happen transparently without any IT effort on our part.”

IslandWood has radically improved its financial and operational visibility with Intacct. Instead of wasting time and compromising data integrity by exporting data to external systems, IslandWood counts on Intacct to handle all of its reporting needs. In addition to using Intacct’s pre-built library of more than 150 reports, including nonprofit-specific financial management reports and FASB and IRS compliant financial statements, IslandWood created custom reports that leverage Intacct’s multidimensional general ledger to track key operational metrics, improve fund and grant management, and streamline expense tracking.

“I no longer need to run reports off of our Blackbaud system and then spend half a day reentering that same data into a specific Excel format for our Board’s finance committee meetings,” commented Sharp. “Now, I use my custom reports in Intacct to give our CEO and senior vice presidents a consistent, real-time view of our financial data, from high-level summaries of funding information and budgets, down to individual contributions and program expenses. In addition, Intacct’s ability to tag specific projects, grants or special event expenses, and then track and report on them by fund makes it easily adaptable to the specialized needs of a nonprofit like us.”

Moving to Intacct’s modern financial applications has also enabled IslandWood to significantly improve day-to-day productivity by automating all of its financial processes, such as invoicing, accounts receivables, credit card reconciliation, accounts payables, and reporting. For example, IslandWood previously entered all school and customer invoices into QuickBooks, and then had to wait until the end of the month to put summary entries in Blackbaud. With Intacct, IslandWood now enters this information once and has real-time, accurate sales and receivables data in one place.

For accounts payables, IslandWood imports purchases from seven credit card cardholders into Intacct, and the application automatically reconciles transactions and provides easy-to-use drill down capabilities. This is a huge improvement over the organization’s previous process of entering credit card transactions into an Excel spreadsheet first and then again into its General Ledger.

Using Intacct’s seamless integration with Salesforce CRM, IslandWood has also streamlined its entire sales cycle – from quotes to invoices to payment processing. The tight connection between these two best-in-class systems eliminates manual data re-entry via an automated, integrated quote-to-cash process, and gives each member of IslandWood’s sales and finance teams the information they need – where and when they need it.

In total, Intacct’s automated processes have enabled the organization’s accounting staff to eliminate duplicate data entry and save around 20 hours of work per month, allowing it to take over payroll processing from the human resources manager and in turn save her an additional two full days of work each month. The improved processes have also reduced the time it takes to consolidate and close its books – shaving off at least two days of the process each month.

“The process improvements we’ve achieved by moving to Intacct have been better than we could have imagined and are extremely valuable to our organization,” added Sharp. “Not only has Intacct’s solution delivered huge time savings for us, the Intacct team has been a pleasure to work with – acting as a trusted partner every step of the way.”